Monday, August 4, 2014

Day 343 - Customizable Cone Hinge

Settings: Optimized for a MakerBot Replicator 2 with default .3mm/low settings, with raft but (and this is key) no supports. For different printers, to change scale, or for tighter/looser hinges, try changing the clearances in the Customizer at the Thingiverse link.

Technical notes, OpenSCAD flavor: This is a conical hinge, so never needs support material. The picture below shows a cross-section about halfway through.

The space between the protruding cones and the cone-shaped holes is controlled by a parameter called clearance, and the space between the hinge and the adjacent bars is controlled by the parameter called gap. A non-customizable parameter called fudge allows us to push things imperceptibly one way or another so as to avoid having identical duplicate triangles in our output mesh. Here is the full OpenSCAD code for this object: